Top 1200 Jazz Quotes & Sayings - Page 5

Explore popular Jazz quotes.
Last updated on December 5, 2024.
As I became an adult, I listened to a lot of jazz, to the ladies of jazz, Ella Fitzgerald and Carmen McRae and Nina Simone. I loved that they each covered the same songs and interpreted them totally differently. I thought that was so cool. They could each paint their own picture of that moment.
Music was not a big deal to me when I was in middle school. And then I slowly became a big jazz fan. Even more than concerts, a lot of my high school time was spent going to jazz clubs in the city.
I never liked jazz music because jazz music doesn't resolve. But I was outside the Bagdad Theater in Portland one night when I saw a man playing the saxophone. I stood there for fifteen minutes, and he never opened his eyes.
I have learned a lot from jazz. I compare good acting to jazz music. The more you study and prepare as an actor, the more equipped you are to live in the moment. Just like the gifted musicians in my dad's quartet, it takes a courageous actor to be free.
I did listen to 1920s jazz or Al Johnson and a lot of early singers coming out of England. I would branch out a little bit to get a sense of the world that he might be coming into, in the '30s when jazz was changing.
In World War II, jazz absolutely was the music of freedom, and then in the Cold War, behind the Iron Curtain, same thing. It was all underground, but they needed the food of freedom that jazz offered.
My dad was a huge big band and jazz fan, and we both sort of enjoyed be-bop, but man, it required so much skill to play it. And then there was cool jazz, the era that Miles, Coltrane, and Ornette ushered in, and that found a home in me. It turns out that that music was just really where I breathed.
I read cover to cover every jazz publication that I could and in the New York Times, every single day reading their jazz reviews even though I didn't put them in the films. I wanted to know what is going on.
I mix everything up. A museum curator once said to me that there is a great jazz component to the way I do things because good jazz is improvisation and draws elements from all different cultures. And that's the way I do everything - the way I dress and decorate.
The guitar for me is a translation device. It's not a goal. And in some ways, jazz isn't a destination for me. For me, jazz is a vehicle that takes you to the true destination - a musical one that describes all kinds of stuff about the human condition and the way music works.
Through the dark days of legalized segregation and on into the civil rights era, jazz shone as a beacon for achieving interracial respect and understanding. It seemed as if the dream of a color-blind society was within reach in the jazz world, where musicians were judged on merit and not skin color.
I never liked jazz music because jazz music doesn't resolve. But I was outside the Bagdad Theater in Portland one night when I saw a man playing the saxophone. I stood there for fifteen minutes, and he never opened his eyes. After that I liked jazz music. Sometimes you have to watch somebody love something before you can love it yourself. It is as if they are showing you the way. I used to not like God because God didn't resolve. But that was before any of this happened.
I didn't plan on rock-n-roll. I wanted to learn jazz; I got to know some people doing rock-n-roll with jazz, and I thought I could make some money playing music. — © Robby Krieger
I didn't plan on rock-n-roll. I wanted to learn jazz; I got to know some people doing rock-n-roll with jazz, and I thought I could make some money playing music.
I find that jazz loosens up the deep place of my mind, lets me find my own strange rhythms. Generally, I find the knottier the jazz, the better. Anything with singing is a distraction. Listening to classical music tends to have the unconscious effect of making my writing too smooth.
I belonged to the Columbia Record Club, and that's where my records came from. For some reason, I was in the 'jazz' category. I got Benny Goodman records and Miles Davis, J.J. Johnson and Kai Winding, and that kind of stuff. I really was not a jazz guy at all, but I knew some of those names.
What I believe to be jazz is constructed and improvised music which is in the air right now. But I don't think that's most people's definition of jazz, you know? We don't know what we're talking about, because we don't know the definition.
I've played with all of the heavyweights in the modern jazz, progressive jazz movement. I've been fortunate enough to play with them, a who's who. All of those guys, I've been fortunate enough to have performed with.
The basic difference between classical music and jazz is that in the former the music is always graver than its performance - whereas the way jazz is performed is always more important than what is being played.
Comedians and jazz musicians have been more comforting and enlightening to me than preachers or politicians or philosophers or poets or painters or novelists of my time. Historians in the future, in my opinion, will congratulate us on very little other than our clowning and our jazz.
If I knew what it was going to look like, I wouldnt be so excited to be a part of it. Jazz is a music of surprise; its a music of spontaneity. I think jazz musicians live--I know I do--for being surprised and not knowing whats going to come next.
I took some lessons as a kid but trained myself by ear. I did it the way jazz musicians used to learn years ago, which is to play records and slow them down to figure out the notes. At first I tried to imitate Red Garland, who was my favorite jazz pianist.
Sometimes I practice to Allan Holdsworth or John McLaughlin, but I don't just practice to jazz and jazz-fusion albums. I'll practice to TV theme music - one of my favorites is 'M*A*S*H.' I'll just play along with anything on the TV.
It's not enough to just be a good singer. You have to know where your roots come from. If you sing jazz, you should know all about jazz. You should look into, as much as you possibly can, the history of it, so that you're and educated and well-informed performer.
People who love jazz musicians love us when we play what we want to play and we're starving. But as soon as you commercialize your sound like Wes Montgomery did, the jazz fans and the critics are down on you!
I was interested in the ways that artists responded to totalitarianism - the Czech Jazz Section, Romanian absurdist theatre, Brecht's alienation effect. The anything-goes, anarchic qualities of jazz and Surrealism seemed to offer a way to cross some of the forbidden frontiers of Eastern Europe.
My school music teacher, Al Bennest, introduced me to jazz by playing Louis Armstrong's record of "West End Blues" for me. I found more jazz on the radio, and began looking for records. My paper route money, and later, money I earned working after school in a print shop and a butcher shop went toward buying jazz records. I taught myself the alto saxophone and the drums in order to play in my high school dance band.
Of course, right away I got more interested in the far-out jazz than the traditional jazz, so I quickly was turned onto the John Zorn scene and all the wild stuff coming out of New York and Europe. Improvising is a pretty natural thing for me.
You know, jazz is the mother of all American music. R&B and pop and rap and everything are the branches on the main tree of the life of music, American music, which is jazz. — © Eric Burdon
You know, jazz is the mother of all American music. R&B and pop and rap and everything are the branches on the main tree of the life of music, American music, which is jazz.
Duke Ellington, Art Tatum, and many other great jazz musicians objected to their music being called jazz. While the outside world may want to put a label on it, those who create it think of it just as music, and tend not to classify it.
For me jazz is kind of an extension of hip-hop. Kind of the sad thing is that a lot of jazz people just listen to jazz, and a lot of hip-hop people just listen to hip-hop, and there's not a lot of crossover, unfortunately.
My dad would play me all of these records: Miles Davis records, John Coltrane records, Bill Evans records, a lot of jazz records. My first exposure to music was listening to jazz records.
I always used to say I'm definitely not a straight-ahead jazz singer, because then there's people who would hear what I do and say, 'Is it jazz? I don't know...' Whatever it is, it really comes down to creating music that makes people feel something.
Jazz radio is not very friendly to pop singers who decide to make a jazz record. But a lot of people have been. A lot of the people I've talked to like the record. — © Rita Coolidge
Jazz radio is not very friendly to pop singers who decide to make a jazz record. But a lot of people have been. A lot of the people I've talked to like the record.
Well, I had started a program which is even longer running than this one in 1967 which was a jazz program called The Best of Jazz and that still goes out on Monday nights. That's been going for 33 years or something.
To jazz, or not to jazz, there is no question!
There is no blood in jazz drumming, and there are no bullies in jazz drumming.
In some ways, jazz is the most precise of art forms and the loosest in the sense that it's all about improvisation, but the musicianship required is kind of insane. To actually play with real jazz musicians is a different level of musicianship that almost has no equal in any other form of music in the world.
It's really not a stretch. The checks and balances are the same. The drums are the executive branch. The jazz orchestra is the legislative branch. Logic and reason are like jazz solos. The bass player is the judicial branch. One our greatest ever is Milt Hinton, and his nickname is "The Judge."
I was really a nerd, and I was really more of a jazz nerd. So when I had my chance to put on something, most of the time it was going to be jazz, or gospel, or something like that.
What basketball expresses is what jazz expresses. Certain cultural predispositions to make art. All African-American art has a substratum, or baseline, of improvisation and spontaneity. You find that in both basketball and jazz.
My audience went, 'Wait, why is she singing jazz? What's going on?' And then they went, 'Oh, because she can. Because she loves it.' And jazz, a music invented by the African-American community, is the greatest art form, I believe, to have ever come out of this country.
I've always been a jazz fan, but I don't write much about jazz, because I don't have the chops. But it's really, really hard to write about improvised instrumental music when you don't have a good knowledge of harmony and can't identify rhythm signatures very easily either.
I've played drums since I was 15. My sisters and I all played instruments. I kind of started with piano and then I actually played saxophone with a jazz band in middle school. So, any knowledge I had of jazz music was from playing alto-sax back then.
I really like the complexity of jazz, the emotional depth; I feel like there's no other music that's really as satisfying as jazz.
I grew up in the funk, rock and roll, blues and r&b tradition, and I came to this thing we call jazz later. And I came to improvise music from the standpoint of jazz; I was improvising, but within these other genres of music.
I think cool originates with the jazz culture in the '40s. There was probably cool before that, but that's when people started talking about cool - Miles Davis and Charlie Parker and a bunch of other early, cool jazz folk.
My first love of jazz came from joining the Chilliwack Middle School band - it was like an 18-piece jazz band, and I wanted to join just because the older kids looked like they were having so much fun.
I still go out, but not a lot. If I go to see music, it's usually to the Blue Note, jazz clubs, things like that. When I travel, I find out where the jazz clubs are. — © Jonathan Demme
I still go out, but not a lot. If I go to see music, it's usually to the Blue Note, jazz clubs, things like that. When I travel, I find out where the jazz clubs are.
The black hole in democracy is integrity. The great unspoken is integrity. When integrity is not first and foremost, it's quite palpable but not visible. It's always there. Jazz highlights it because musicians and jazz always represented a high level of integrity.
I had always been a jazz fan - Django Reinhardt, Kenny Burrell, Wes Montgomery, Joe Pass, the early George Benson. And I come from the Hank Marvin melodic upbringing. So blues, I loved, but I also liked jazz. Therefore, my style was more lyrical.
My father had played cornet, although I never saw him play it. I found his mouthpiece when I was a kid. I used to buzz it. And my mother played piano and sang in the church choir for different functions. So there was always music in the house, jazz, gospel, or whatever. Especially jazz records.
Jazz is more raw than punk in a lot of ways. It's so expressive. A lot of people say to me, especially older people, 'It took me ages to get into jazz.'
What I would really like to have been, given a perfect world, is a jazz pianist. I mean jazz. I don't mean rock and roll. I mean the never-the-same-twice music the American black people gave the world.
The emphasis in each piece is on building a whole, totally integrated structure. In doing this, we try to carry on - in ensemble as well as solo sections - the mood of a jazz soloist. I mean that principle of kinetic improvisation that keeps a jazz solo building.
I was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, and am a product of a family that were jazz aficionados and also very interested in progressive politics. And so I had a lot of artists and musicians in my home. Lots of Latin music, folk, and jazz and blues, bluegrass-type of stuff. Painters and stuff like that.
It's always difficult to define what jazz is or what jazz isn't. To me, the only definition that I can think of is it's music where a lot of different elements are played at the same time. The harmonic, the melodic... You're pushing the boundaries on every level. That could be true of rhythm and blues as well. I'm a musician.
In Jazz, improvisation isn't a matter of just making any ol' thing up. Jazz, like any language, has its own grammer and vocabulary. There's no right or wrong, just some choices that are better than others.
Maybe a part of me recognized how right the improvising spirit of jazz is. Not the sounds, but the freedom to work with musicians who work that way. It felt very natural to me, but I think there's a way to do it without it being a jazz record.
Jazz is a big thing with me. It's a very big passion of mine, to play it. I'm an amateur musician and I love everything about it. I was obsessed with jazz when I was 15 years old and I know a lot about it because I've loved it so much.
Presley is country music, white music. Jazz is black music - it was invented by the blacks in New Orleans. And I'm really a jazz singer. I was impressed with Elvis - he was the handsomest guy I ever met in my life, and a very nice person, too. But the music doesn't impress me.
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